Mirror Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It is said that a mirror can trap a person’s soul…

  Martin Williams is a broke, two-bit screenwriter living in Hollywood, but when he finds the very mirror that once hung in the house of a murdered 1930s child star, he happily spends all he has on it. He has long obsessed over the tragic story of Boofuls, a beautiful and successful actor who was slaughtered and dismembered by his grandmother.

  However, he soon discovers that this dream buy is in fact a living nightmare; the mirror was not only in Boofuls’ house, but witness to the death of this blond-haired and angelic child, which in turn has created a horrific and devastating portal to a hellish parallel universe. So when Martin’s landlord loses his grandson, it is soon apparent that the mirror is responsible.

  But if a little boy has gone into the mirror, what on earth is going to come out?

  About the Author

  Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946. After training as a newspaper reporter, Graham went on to edit the new British men’s magazine Mayfair. At the age of 24, Graham was appointed executive editor of both Penthouse and Penthouse Forum magazines.

  Graham Masterton’s debut as a horror author began with the wildly popular The Manitou in 1976. Altogether Graham has written over a hundred novels, ranging from thrillers and horror to disaster novels and historical sagas, as well as four short story collections.

  MIRROR

  GRAHAM MASTERTON

  À François Truchaud

  Merci, mon ami!

  One

  MORRIS NATHAN LIFTED his folded sunglasses up in front of his eyes like a lorgnette and watched in satisfaction as his fourth wife circled idly around the pool on her inflatable sunbed. ‘Martin,’ he replied, ‘you should save your energy. Nobody, but nobody, is going to want to make a picture about Boofuls. Why do you think that nobody’s done it already?’

  ‘Maybe nobody thought of it,’ Martin suggested. ‘Maybe somebody thought of it, but felt that it was too obvious. But it seems like a natural to me. The small golden-haired boy from Idaho state orphanage who became a worldwide star in less than three years.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Morris agreed. ‘And then got himself chopped up into more pieces than a Colonel Sanders Party Bucket.’

  Martin put down his drink. ‘Well, yes. But everybody knows that, I mean that’s part of the basic legend, so I haven’t actually shown his death in any kind of graphic detail. You just see him being driven out of the studio that last evening, then fade-out. It’s a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You remember the way that ended.’

  Morris lowered his sunglasses and squinted at Martin thoughtfully. ‘You know something, Martin? I used to deceive myself that I married for intellect, can you believe that? Conversation, wit, perception – that’s what I wanted in a woman. Or at least, that’s what I kidded myself I wanted in a woman. My first three wives were all college graduates. Well, you remember Sherri, don’t you – my third? Who could forget her, I ask? But then one day just after Sherri and I were divorced, I was looking through my photo albums, and I realized that each of my wives had one thing in common that wasn’t anything to do with intellect.’

  He turned and looked fondly out at the twenty-nine-year-old titian-haired woman in the tiny crochet bikini circling around and around on the breeze-ruffled surface of the pool.

  ‘Jugs,’ he said, ‘that’s what I married them for. And I was being a fool to myself for not admitting it. I was like the guy who buys Playboy and tells himself he’s buying it for the articles.’ He wiped his mouth with his open hand. ‘It’s infantile, sure. But that’s what I like. Jugs.’

  Martin shielded his eyes with his hand and peered out at the woman in the pool. ‘You made a good choice this time, then?’

  ‘Well, sure. Because Alison has the figure without the brains. If you subtract her IQ from her bra size, you get a factor of eleven. And, believe me, next time I meet a woman I take a shine to, that’s going to be the only statistic I’ll ever want to know.’

  Martin paused for a moment before getting back to the subject of Boofuls. He didn’t want Morris to think that he wasn’t interested in Alison, or how small her mind was, or how enormous her breasts. He picked up his vodka-and-orange-juice, and sipped a little, and then set it down on the white cast-iron table.

  ‘I have the treatment here if you want to read it,’ he said, clearing his throat.

  Morris slowly shook his head. ‘It’s poison, Martin. I can’t think of a single producer who isn’t going to hate the idea. It has the mark of Cain. All the sickness of Fatty Arbuckle and Lupe Velez and Sharon Tate. Forget it. Everybody else has.’

  ‘They still show Whistlin’ Dixie on late-night television,’ Martin persisted. ‘Almost anybody you meet can remember at least two lines of “Heartstrings”, even if they don’t know who originally sang it.’

  Morris was silent for a long time. A pair of California quail fluttered onto the roof of his Tudor-style pool-house and began to warble and look around for dry-roasted peanuts. Eventually, Morris said, ‘You’re a good writer, Martin. One day you’re going to be a rich writer, that’s if you’re lucky. But if you try to tout this particular property around Hollywood, you’re not going to be any kind of writer at all, because nobody is going to want to know you. Just do yourself a favor and forget that Boofuls ever existed.’

  ‘Come on, Morris, that’s ridiculous. That’s like trying to say that Shirley Temple never existed.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Shirley Temple wasn’t brutally hacked to death by her grandmother, now, was she?’

  Martin rolled up his screenplay into a tight tube and smacked it into the palm of his hand. ‘I don’t know, Morris. It’s something I really want to do. It has absolutely everything. Songs, dancing, a sentimental story line.’

  Alison had paddled herself to the side of the pool and was climbing out. Morris watched her with benign possessiveness, his sun-reddened hands clasped over his belly like Buddha. ‘Isn’t she something?’ he asked the world.

  Martin nodded to Alison and said, ‘How’re you doing?’

  Alison reached out and shook his hand and sprinkled water all over his shirt and his screenplay. ‘I’m fine, thanks. But I think my nose is going to peel. What do you think?’

  ‘You should use sunscreen, my petal,’ said Morris.

  Alison was quite pretty in a vacant sort of way. Snub nose, with freckles. Pale green eyes. Wide, orthodontically immaculate smile. And really enormous breasts, each one as big as her head, barely contained in her crochet bikini top. By quick reckoning Martin worked out that her IQ was 29, give or take an inch.

  ‘Are you staying for lunch?’ Alison asked him. ‘We only have fruit and yogurt. You know – my figure and Morry’s tum-tum.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘I only came over to show Morris my new screenplay.’

  Alison giggled and leaned forward to kiss Morris on his furrowed scarlet forehead. ‘I hope he liked it, he’s been so-o-o grouchy today.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Martin, ‘as a matter of fact he hated it.’

  ‘Oh, Morry,’ Alison pouted.

  Morris let out a leaky, exasperated sigh. ‘Martin has written a screenplay about Boofuls.’

  Alison made a face of childish disgust.
‘Boofuls? No wonder Morry hated it. That’s so icky. You mean a horror picture?’

  ‘Not a horror picture,’ Martin replied, trying to be patient. ‘A musical, based on his life. I was going to leave out what happened to him in the end.’

  ‘But how can you do that?’ asked Alison innocently. ‘I mean, when you say “Boofuls”, that’s all that anybody ever remembers. You know – what happened to him in the end.’

  Morris shrugged at Martin as if that conclusively proved his point. If a girl as dumb as Alison thought that it was icky to write a screenplay about Boofuls, then what was Paramount going to think about it? Or M-G-M, where Boofuls had been shooting his last, unfinished picture on the day he was murdered?

  Martin finished his drink and stood up. ‘I guess I’d better go. I still have that A-Team rewrite to finish.’

  Morris eased himself back on his sunbed, and Alison perched herself on his big hairy thigh.

  ‘Listen,’ said Morris, ‘I can’t stop you trying to sell that idea. But my advice is, don’t. It won’t do you any good and it’ll probably do you a whole lot of harm. If you do try, though, you don’t bring my name into it. You understand?’

  ‘Sure, Morris,’ said Martin, deliberately keeping his voice flat. ‘I understand. Thanks for your valuable time.’

  He left the poolside and walked across the freshly watered lawn to the rear gate. His sun-faded bronze Mustang was parked under a eucalyptus just outside. He tossed the screenplay onto the passenger seat, climbed in, and started the engine.

  ‘Morris Nathan, arbiter of taste,’ he said out loud as he backed noisily into Mulholland Drive. ‘God save us from agents, and all their works.’

  On the way back to his apartment on Franklin Avenue he played the sound track from Boofuls’ last musical, Sunshine Serenade, on his car stereo, with the volume turned all the way up. He stopped at the traffic signals at the end of Mulholland, and two sun-freckled teenage girls on bicycles stared at him curiously and giggled. The sweeping strings of the M-G-M Studio Orchestra and the piping voice of Boofuls singing ‘Sweep up Your Broken Sunbeams’ were hardly the kind of in-car entertainment that anybody would have expected from a thin, bespectacled thirty-four-year-old in a faded checkered shirt and stone-washed jeans.

  ‘Shall we dance?’ one of them teased him. He gave her a tight smile and shook his head. He was still sore at Morris for having squashed his Boofuls concept so completely. When he thought of some of the dumb, tasteless ideas that Morris had come up with, Martin couldn’t even begin to understand why he had regarded Boofuls as such a hoodoo. They’d made movies about James Dean, for God’s sake; and Patricia Neal’s stroke; and Helter Skelter; and Teddy Kennedy’s bone cancer. I mean, that was taste? What was so off-putting about Boofuls?

  He turned off Sunset with a squeal of balding tires. He parked in the street because his landlord, Mr Capelli, always liked to garage his ten-year-old Lincoln every night, in case somebody scratched it, or lime pollen fell on it, or a passing bird had the temerity to spatter it with half-digested seeds. Martin called the Lincoln ‘the Mafiamobile’, but not to Mr Capelli’s face.

  Upstairs, in his single-bedroom apartment, his coffee cup and his breakfast plate and last night’s supper plate were stacked in the kitchen sink, exactly where he had left them. That was one feature of living alone that he still couldn’t quite get used to. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the rumpled futon on which he now slept alone, and the large framed poster for Boofuls’ first musical Whistlin’ Dixie. He walked through to the bare white-painted sitting room, with its single antique sofa upholstered in carpetbag fabric and its gray steel desk overlooking the window. Jane had taken everything else. She and her new boyfriend had simply marched in and carried it all away, while Martin had carried on typing.

  The boyfriend had even the nerve to tap the desk and ask Jane, ‘You want this, too?’

  Without looking up from the tenth draft of his A-Team episode, Martin had said, in his BA Baracas accent, ‘Touch this desk and you die, suckah!’

  Jane’s departure had brought with it immediate relief from their regular shouting contests, and all the tension and discomfort that had characterized their marriage. It had also given Martin the opportunity to work all day and half of the night without being disturbed. That was how he had been able to finish his screenplay for Boofuls! in four days flat. But after three weeks he was beginning to realize that work was very much less than everything. Jane might have been demanding and awkward and self-opinionated, but at least she had been somebody intelligent to talk to, somebody to share things with, somebody to hold on to. What was the point of sitting in front of the television on your own, drinking wine on your own, and laughing out loud at E.R. with nothing but a lunatic echo to keep you company?

  Martin dropped his rejected screenplay onto his desk. The top of the desk was bare except for his Olivetti typewriter, a stack of paper, and a black-and-white publicity still of Boofuls in a brass frame. It was signed, ‘To Moira, with xxx’s from Boofuls’. Martin had found the photograph in The Reel Thing, a movie memorabilia store on Hollywood Boulevard: he had no idea who Moira might have been.

  The wall at the side of his desk was covered from floor to ceiling with photographs and cuttings and posters and letters all of Boofuls. Here was Boofuls dancing with Jenny Farr in Sunshine Serenade. Boofuls in a sailor suit. Boofuls in a pretend biplane in a scene from Dancing on the Clouds. An original letter from President Roosevelt, thanking Boofuls for boosting public morale with his song ‘March, March, March, America!’ Then the yellowed front page from the Los Angeles Times, Saturday, August 19, 1939: ‘Boofuls Murdered. Doting Grandma Dismembers Child Star, Hangs Self’.

  Martin stood for a long time staring at the headlines. Then, petulantly, he tore the newspaper off the wall and rolled it up into a ball. But his anger quickly faded, and he carefully opened the page out again and smoothed it on the desk with the edge of his hand.

  He had always been entranced by 1930s Hollywood musicals, ever since he was a small boy, and the idea for Boofuls! had germinated in the back of his mind from the first week he had taken up screenwriting (that wonderful long-gone week when he had sold a Fall Guy script to Glen A Larson). Boofuls! had glimmered in the distance for four years now, a golden mirage, his one great chance of fame and glory. Boofuls!, a musical by Martin Williams. He couldn’t write music, of course, but he didn’t need to. Boofuls had recorded over forty original songs, most of them written by Glazer and Hanson, all of them scintillating, all of them catchy, and most of them deleted, so they wouldn’t be too expensive for any studio to acquire. Boofuls! was a ready-made smash, as far as Martin could see, and nobody had ever done it before.

  Morris Nathan was full of shit. He was only jealous because he hadn’t thought of it and because Martin had shown his first signs of creative independence. Morris preferred his writers tame. That’s why people like Stephen J Cannell and Mort Lachman always came to him for rewrites. Morris’ writers would rewrite a teleplay four hundred times if it was required of them, and never complain. Not out loud, anyway. They were the galley slaves of Hollywood.

  Although he never worked well when he was drinking, Martin went across to the windowsill and uncorked the two-liter bottle of chardonnay red which he had been keeping to celebrate Morris Nathan’s enthusiastic acclaim for the Boofuls! idea. He poured himself a large glassful and drank half of it straight off. Morris Nathan. What a mamzer.

  He went across to the portable Sony cassette recorder which was all the hi-fi that Jane had left him, and rewound it to the beginning of ‘Whistlin’ Dixie’. Those gliding strings began again, that familiar introduction, and then the voice of that long-dead child started to sing.

  All those times you ran and hid

  Never did those things you should have did

  All those times you shook in your shoes

  Never had the nerve to face your blues

  You were – Whistlin’ Dixie!

  Marti
n leaned against the side of the window and looked down into the next-door yard. It was mostly swimming pool, surrounded by bright green synthetic-grass carpeting. Maria was there again, on her sunbed, her eyes closed, her nose and her nipples protected from the morning sun by paper Sno-Cones. Maria worked as a cocktail waitress at the Sunset Hyatt. Her surname was Bocanegra, and she had thighs like Carmen Miranda. Martin had asked her for a date one day, about fifteen seconds before a huge Latin bodybuilder with pockmarked cheeks had appeared around the corner of her apartment building and scooped his arm around her and grinned at Martin and said, ‘Cómo la va, hombre?’

  Martin had blurted out a quick ‘Hasta luego’, and that had been the beginning and end of a beautiful relationship.

  He sipped wine and thought about getting back to the A-Team rewrite, but it was pretty hard to get into Murdock’s latest outbreak of nuttiness when he was feeling so down about Boofuls! He whispered the words along with the tape. ‘You were – Whistlin’ Dixie!’

  Just then the telephone rang. He let it ring for a while. He guessed it was Morris, more than likely, wanting to know when the rewrite was going to be completed. The way he felt at the moment, January 2010. At last, however, Martin turned away from the window and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Martin Williams.’

  ‘Hey, Martin!’ said an enthusiastic voice. ‘I’m real glad I got in touch with you! This is Ramone!’

  ‘Oh, Ramone, hi.’ Ramone worked behind the counter at The Reel Thing, selling everything from souvenir programs for the opening night of Gone With the Wind to Ida Lupino’s earrings. It was Ramone more than anybody else who had helped him to build up his unique collection of Boofuls souvenirs.

  ‘Listen, Martin, something real interesting came up. A lady came into the store this morning and said she had a whole lot of furniture for sale.’